OFDM and OFDMA wireless communication systems under IEEE 802.16 use a network of base stations to communicate with wireless devices (i.e., mobile stations) registered for services in the systems based on the orthogonality of frequencies of multiple subcarriers and can be implemented to achieve a number of technical advantages for wideband wireless communications, such as resistance to multipath fading and interference. Each base station emits and receives radio frequency (RF) signals that convey data to and from the mobile stations. Such an RF signal from a base station includes an overhead load, in addition to the data load (voice and other data), for various communication management functions. Each mobile station processes the information in the overhead load of each received signal prior to processing the data.
The IEEE 802.16x standard was developed for the delivery of such wideband services as voice, data, and video. The Media Access Control (MAC) layer of the standard can support bursty data traffic with high peak rate demand while simultaneously supporting streaming video and latency-sensitive voice traffic over the same channel. Some of this traffic may include broadcast and/or multicast data intended for delivery to a plurality of mobile stations. The resources allocated to one mobile station or to a multicast/broadcast connection by the MAC scheduler can vary from a single time slot to the entire OFDM/OFDMA frame, thus providing a very large dynamic range of throughput to a specific mobile station or to a plurality of mobile stations, respectively, at any given time. Furthermore, since the resource allocation information is conveyed in the MAP messages at the beginning of each frame, the scheduler can effectively change the resource allocation on a frame-by-frame basis to adapt to the bursty nature of the traffic.